Ocean Crusader Awarded Top Prize

Boyan Slat Youngest Winner of the United Nation’s Champions of the Earth Award for Inspiring Efforts to Cleanup the Ocean

Geneva, 17 November 2014 – Boyan Slat, 19, founder of the innovative The Ocean Cleanup initiative and Eminent Environmental Scientist Sir Robert Watson were announced Tuesday as winners of the UN’s top environmental accolade, the Champion of the Earth award.

The Inspiration and Action award, which has been won in previous years by Brian McClendon of Google Earth and Carlo Petrini, Founder of Slow Food, was awarded to Boyan Slat for his inspirational efforts to mobilize support to rid the ocean of marine litter.

Slat was still in secondary school when he came up with the idea of utilizing the natural ocean currents and winds to passively concentrate and transport floating plastic along solid floating barriers towards a central collection platform. According to the Ocean Cleanup’s recently published feasibility research, they estimate that almost half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can be removed using this technology in ten years’ time.

It is hoped that The Ocean Cleanup initiative can contribute to ongoing worldwide efforts to tackle the escalating problem that widespread plastic waste is posing to marine life.

UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said, “The marine litter problem is global in scale and intergenerational in impact, exacting tremendous ecological, economic, and social costs around the world. According to UNEP research conservative estimates of the overall financial damage of plastics to marine ecosystems now stand at US$13 billion each year.”

“Boyan Slat is inspiring people, organizations and governments to find solutions to the escalating threat of plastic debris in our oceans, while also serving as a reminder to us all that more work needs to be done to improve the capacity of all countries to better manage solid waste and to make production and consumption patterns far more sustainable so that we produce less waste, and put less pressure on our increasingly degraded ocean.”

Slat has also been recognized as one of the 20 Most Promising Young Entrepreneurs Worldwide by Intel EYE50. Slat’s presentation at TEDxDelft 2012 has been viewed by over 1.6 million people and he has managed to raise over US$2 million through crowdfunding(with the support of over 38,000 funders from 160 countries) to fund the next phase of
The Ocean Cleanup initiative.

Boyan Slat said, “I’m incredibly excited and honoured to receive this award on behalf of everyone at The Ocean Cleanup, a team of more than 100 people worldwide. Although we are still several years away from implementing the technology, I’m truly grateful that our hard work is already being recognized. We’ll continue to do our utmost to fulfill the expectations, and initiate the largest ocean cleanup in history.”

For more information on UNEP’s Champions of the Earth visit http://www.unep.org